Lonely Boy: The Journey Inward
When I began writing Lonely Boy I didn’t even know it would become a book. I just had some stuff to work through. Some roadblocks that had been preventing me from leading a more rounded and happy life for some years.
And then it became a book, slowly and surely. It became an honest and sometimes difficult reflection upon who I’ve been over the last ten years. I haven’t always been a good person or done the right things. I’m often been selfish, and this is because I was hurting from wounds I refused to let heal.
For a long time, I thought that I became lonely due to events that happened to me as a teenager. I just assumed that this was the case.
But in writing Lonely Boy I’ve come to learn that I’ve always been predisposed to loneliness. It finds me, it has found me, for my whole life. And so in writing this I’ve learned that I need to make effort every day to not fall into loneliness. I need to put in the effort because left to my own devices I recede and self-isolate and become alone.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
You may not want, nor need, to write a book, but I do recommend looking inward, deeper than you ever have, if you have the ability, if you’re open to admitting to the darker parts of who you are. It isn’t easy.
But when you do this – when you look objectively at who you are and accept yourself as a whole, as a person with virtues and vices and flaws and perfections – then the pain starts to diminish.
You learn to stop judging yourself so harshly, because you accept that you are flawed, and that you are still human in spite of these flaws.
Lonely Boy releases on November 24th, and will be launched from Cork City Library at 6:30PM. Everyone who reads this blog and supports the work means the world to me. You’ve truly changed my life. And so if you are unsure as to whether you should come to the launch, know that I want you there, because without you there is no work.
You are absolutely, unreservedly welcome.
